ZedBoard Part 1 Introduction

How exciting! I just took delivery of my very own ZedBoard — a low-cost development board for the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC (AP SoC).

As I’m sure you will recall, the Zynq itself combines a full hard core implementation of a dual ARM Cortex-A9 microcontroller subsystem (running at up to 1GHz and including floating-point engines, on-chip cache, counters, timers, etc.), coupled with a wide range of hard core interface functions (SPI, I2C, CAN, etc.), and a hard core dynamic memory controller, all augmented with a large quantity of traditional programmable fabric, some programmable analog functionality, and a substantial number of general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins. In addition to the Zynq, the ZedBoard contains everything necessary to create a Linux, Android, Windows, or other OS/RTOS-based design. Additionally, several expansion connectors expose the processing system and programmable logic I/Os for easy user access.

For my first blogs about the Zynq, I thought would write a simple guide explaining how the design tools integrate and what is needed to get the board up and running with a simple application that can be built upon in both software and hardware terms.

Creating an All Programmable SoC design requires a little more effort than developing a traditional logic-based FPGA design; however, it is still pretty straightforward and the tool chain provides good guidance. To create an All Programmable SoC design, you will need to use, as a minimum, the following:

Xilinx Platform Studio: This is where you create you processing system, be it a PowerPC, Microblaze, or — in this case — the Zynq’s dual core ARM Cortex-A9. Here you define the configuration, interfaces, timing, and address ranges; everything needed to generate a processor system. The output from this process is an HDL netlist defining your system.

Xilinx ISE: Most FPGA engineers are familiar with this tool, which takes your HDL design — including the XPS netlist — and generates the required BIT configuration file.

Xilinx Software Development Kit (SDK): This is where the software that will run on the processing system is developed. To correctly generate the software, the SDK needs to be aware of the hardware configuration of the system.

Impact: Performs the loading of the BIT configuration bitfile into the system.

All of these tools can be used in isolation to create an All Programmable SoC. Rather helpfully, however, Xilinx PlanAhead is capable of integrating them together, thereby allowing for a much simpler development process. It is using this PlanAhead approach that I will focus upon for the rest of this blog.

Zynq devices are split into two distinct sections: the programmable logic (PL) section and the processing system (PS) section. This blog will predominantly focus on implementing a PS system augmented with a simple logic design within the PL fabric, thereby allowing me to demonstrate an implementation that uses both sections of the Zynq.

The first step in this development is to open PlanAhead and create a new RTL project as shown in the following two images

This is fairly straightforward since — as you initially have no existing RTL, IP, or constraints — you can simply keep on selecting the “Next” option until you reach the “Device Selection” dialog. It is at this dialog that you should select the board option — not the device — and target the Xilinx ZC702 Evaluation board as shown below. Yes, I know that this is not the ZedBoard, but we will return to deal with this point in my next blog

Once the project has been created, you will be presented with the default screen in PlanAhead, at which point you need to add a source to the design. You can do this by selecting the “Add Sources” item under the “Project Manager” options in the “Flow Navigator” area, which should be on the left-hand side of the screen as shown below

As we are currently interested in getting the processing system side of the Zynq up and running, select the “Add or Create Embedded Sources” option as shown in the following image. As we shall see, the general-purpose input/output (I/O) for our programmable logic will be called up here as well

This will open yet another dialog, from which we can select the “Create Sub-Design” button as shown in the image below

OK, we’re almost there. Although this may seem a little complicated, it’s actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. In my next blog we will complete the configuration and use PlanAhead to generate the bitstream and download it into the device.